World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [37]
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Unspoken White Dominance in Brazil
Brazil, famous for being a “racial democracy,” offers perhaps the most fascinating example of a deeply internalized but suppressed color hierarchy. For generations, Brazilians of all classes have been told, and to some extent have apparently believed, that centuries of racial mixing had erased the color line, making racism impossible. For many Brazilians, the contrast between the racial harmony in their country and the racial conflict in the United States has long been a source of pride.
But in fact, as throughout Latin America, the stark reality in Brazil is that a tiny, light-skinned, market-dominant minority has always had a stranglehold on economic and political power. Throughout Brazil the most prestigious and highest-paying jobs in business, politics, and universities are held by those with light skin.
35 Brazil’s exclusive private schools are glaringly white. In a country where a vast majority of the population is (by U.S. standards) black, writes Eugene Robinson in his recent book Coal to Cream, the leading tycoons, wealthiest landowners, fanciest neighborhoods, and toniest social clubs, not to mention the virtual entirety of Brasilia’s limo-riding bureaucratic elite, are wildly disproportionately white.
In the opening scene of Coal to Cream, Robinson describes a remarkable exchange he had with acquaintances on Ipanema Beach. Robinson, who is African-American and an editor at the Washington Post, asked his colleague’s Brazilian girlfriend Velma—a small woman with “flaring nostrils, high cheekbones, and brown skin at least a couple of shades darker than mine”—what it was like being black in Brazil. Velma responded with a look of genuine surprise. “But I’m not,” she said. “I’m not black.”
To Robinson, however, “it was obvious at first glance” that Velma was primarily a descendant of African slaves, and he blurted out, “But you must be, Velma. I’m black, and you’re as dark as I am.” Velma, however, maintained that she most definitely was not black and, moreover, that as far as she was concerned, Robinson wasn’t really “black” either. Later, after Velma had left, another Brazilian explained to Robinson “that Velma had long, straight hair, and that she also enjoyed the considerable status and income that came from her job as a lawyer. So naturally—and this was said as if it were the most natural thing in the world, though it made no sense at all to me—she called herself white.”
At first Velma’s reaction causes Robinson to question his own American inclination to identify as “black” anyone who has a visible African heritage. Gradually, however, Robinson sheds his initial infatuation with Brazil, which, on first encounter, seemed “a great black nation—unadvertised as such,” a wonderful “mélange of blacks and browns and tans and taupes, of coppers and cinnamons.” As Robinson looks deeper into Brazil, he begins to see a startling degree of racial inequity combined with pervasive racial denial.
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The millions of African slaves brought over to work Brazil’s plantations far exceeded the number brought into the United States. Slavery in Brazil outlasted that in the United States by a generation. Today, Brazil’s tens of millions of grotesquely impoverished, slum-dwelling or cane-cutting pobres are, again by U.S. standards, overwhelmingly black. Dark-skinned Afro-Brazilians occupy Brazil’s lowest-rung jobs and fill Brazil’s disease-ridden prisons. As late as 1988, poor blacks in Brazil were disenfranchised on illiteracy grounds. Meanwhile, “mulattoes” or persons of “mixed race,” although said to enjoy slightly greater mobility than their darker-skinned counterparts, are starkly underprivileged as compared to the “white” minority.
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For years the myth of racial democracy has covered over these stark ethnic disparities in wealth. It may be wondered whether the poorest, dark-skinned Afro-Brazilians ever believed in this myth. Nevertheless, many Brazilians high and low often insist that “race” is not an important factor in Brazil, because “people are always passing